pokemon-coins Using Copied Sovereign Images on eBay
eBay seller pokemon-coins of montevideo, Uruguay, not only stole our 1958 Sovereign Photographs without permission to sell his sovereigns, but stated that the photos were of his actual coins, thereby deceiving all potential buyers, and continued to lie about the origin of the photographs when challenged by an alert and honest eBay member.

High eBay Feedback is No Guarantee of Integrity or Honesty
When we wrote this page, this eBay member's feedback was 1340; with 99.7% positive according to eBay.
It also demonstrates that high eBay feedback is no indicator of intelligence, reading ability or honesty.

Sample Listing

UK GREAT BRITAIN Sovereign 1958 Nice Gold coin
UK GREAT BRITAIN Sovereign 1958 Nice Gold coin Size Diameter: 22mm
Composition: GOLD
weight: 7,9grs.
please look at the pictures for condition
PayPal is always welcomed.
PAYMENT DUE WITHIN 7 DAYS OF AUCTION CLOSE
shipping:worldwide:$ 6.50 with registered airmail includes a tracking number traceable in the web that informs date the package leaves the country and destiny. 3 to 5 weeks to reach destination.
THANK YOU AND GOOD LUCK!!
Any questions, please email
welcome to my shop click logo
Super variety
pokemon-coins-store

What's Wrong?
We invest a great deal of time, effort, and cost into creating some of the best photographic coin images on the internet. We strongly object when lazy and dishonest people decide to use them without a by your leave or thanks, doing so in competition with us.
Copyright theft is dishonest. We recommend you avoid doing business with dishonest dealers.
This particular eBay seller not only stole our high quality images of both sides of a 1958 gold sovereign, he used them in his eBay auctions to try to sell his own sovereign without saying it was not the same coin. Anyone viewing the photographs would expect them to be the same, near perfect condition coin, "airbrushed" to make them look like supermodels.
In addition, this stupid ignorant crook said "please look at the pictures for condition", strongly implying that the photographs were of the actual coin on offer.

It is always possible, even likely, that sellers who steal photographs do not own a similar coin, and have the intention to totally defraud potential buyers.
The vendor is not only cheating us by stealing our copyright images, he is fraudulently or ignorantly misleading and deceiving all potential buyers. Gaining pecuniary advantage by deception is the definition of fraud.

Dishonest Pillock Insulting Our Intelligence
We spotted this eBay auction listing this morning on our daily monitoring of eBay. It was instantly obvious to us that the photograph of the 1958 sovereign reverse was ours. We can usually tell them instantly, this particular photo is also one used by a British dealer and BNTA member without our permission, and against whom we are about to issue expensive (for him) legal proceedings. One obvious feature of this photo is the dark area on the border to the right of the date. Ideally, we should have found a cleaner coin to photograph or at least fixed it in Adobe Photoshop. Pokemon-coins has changed our white background to red to match all his other images, and has resized our original 400x400 pixel images to 456x464 pixels, and in doing so managed to lose the Digimarc watermark.
Similarly the obverse photo is also ours, but is actually of a 1963 sovereign, which is identical apart from the date. Again, we can recognise our photo in several ways, it has a few distinctive features such as lines and shadow areas. In any criminal court this would be strong enough evidence to hang a murderer, being not just beyond reasonable doubt, but beyond any doubt at all.

Dishonest - Certainly!
It is now standard for us to point out in our copyright theft pages that copyright theft is dishonest, although there is apparently something known as innocent infringement. In this case, if there were any doubt at all about the honesty of pokemon-coins, we have more evidence sent to us by one of the few honest eBay members. It consists of an exchange of messages via the eBay message system:

You are asking people to look at the pictures to judge the condition of your coin but you stole your pictures from Chard Coins, here, https://goldsovereigns.co.uk/1958sovereign.php, a breach of copyright law and of eBay rules. Do you actually have a coin for sale? Why did you allege that the pictures are of your coin? Why can't you use genuine images of your coin?

hi xxx
you're wrong
has 56 gold coins in the world and
the photos are authentic
observers to appreciate good photos
thanks.
- pokemon-coins

Dear pokemon-coins,
Lawrence Chard paid a Chinese art student to take the photographs and then work on them with Photoshop. They are distinct and unmistakable and I am not wrong. So I have reported this listing to Lawrence Chard and to eBay. Look at my guides and you will realise that I never get this wrong and I don't appreciate the insult to my intelligence.

Seller ID	Item Number	Date	Description	Price
pokemon-coins	120541270795	10th Mar 2010	UK GREAT BRITAIN Sovereign 1958 Nice Gold coin	$99.99

Price
The seller was asking a starting price of $99.99; which is basically pointless, as its intrinsic value is about $263!.

Cheap? - We Doubt It
We took a quick look at pokemon-coins other items listed (542 of them), mainly to check whether he was using any other of our photos, and happened to notice he was offering an extremely common 1967 British penny at a starting price of $9 US. Although we might ask �1 for 1 (our minimum charge), we would also offer 10 for �2, 100 for �5, or a complete 1,200 piece mint sack, all with original mint lustre, for about �50.

eBay Guilty of Negligence or Complicity
We will be reporting this example of copyright abuse using our standard Statutory Declaration via the eBay VeRO programme, and wait to see if they chose to action or ignore our report. We look forward to taking legal action against eBay for their negligence and / or complicity if they fail to take down the offending material promptly.
We also intend to advise them that their member is making misleading and fraudulent claims and statements, but doubt they will take any notice as usual. If they did, their revenues would plummet.

Selling Gold Sovereigns & Other Coins on eBay
We point out that sellers may often get more money, for less effort, by selling to a specialised dealer, such as us, rather than via eBay.

Copyright Notice
Please see our "Copyright" page for further information.